Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I want to make a point on this because it drives me cracked. We always think that everything in the Gaeltacht has to be small. My experience is that the kind of money that LEOs will give will not really create anything into the future. They are confined to less than ten employees. It is very possible to create jobs and there are some companies in the Gaeltacht that employ a few hundred people. Some of them are international and some of them are local. One of the problems is that there is a perception there that if it is rural then it has to be a LEO-type operation rather than a serious industry that is competitive internationally. Some of them are local and competing internationally. I was at a meeting the other night and I was talking to a man from one of our local industries that employs about 60 people and I asked if they were worried about Brexit. He said they were not because they came through the downturn and they did fine. They were basically dealing with stone and they export the whole lot of it. To me, what made them succeed was attitude and intelligence. They do not tolerate the idea that they have to be small. I remember seeing a spatial strategy and I took the word small out of it. I got the draft when I was a Minister and they were only going to put small industries in rural areas. I wonder what the validation of this idea of small industries is rather than going for everything that can be got and if a 200 employee sustainable industry based on raw materials can be created then what about it?